China's Dream of Red Chambers.

I discovered history in China, the live, avid history that breathes down one's neck when one is thinking about something else. And although it was a history in flames, from which voices of the past wailed like restless ghosts, it gave a peculiar depth to the people 1 knew. It also cast an unsettling shadow on our characteris tic American stance that history starts when we say "go." 1 am riding my bicycle past row upon row of identical concrete dormi tories, each as raw as the next, separated only by bicycle racks and otherwise bare cement courts. Parking my bike in one of the racks, I walk up three flights of concrete stairs to visit a couple I know, a man in his seventies and his wife, maybe seven years younger. They are both professors at Peking University, and she was recently honored with the title of "model teacher" one in whose classes other teachers sit in order to learn their trade. Now I am going up the stairs of their stark dormitory, and when I reach their door I knock. They aren't expect ing me. I have stopped by on my bicycle-these things aren't done either effi ciently or properly on the telephone-to ask them to have dinner with my family later in the week. It is she who opens the door, but for a moment, only a crack. And in that moment, I glimpse on her face an expression like I have never seen. It's not exactly terror. It's rather the look of someone who has seen the worst thing that could walk through the door, and who knows that it could walk through the door again. But all this takes place in an instant, and then, as if it hadn't happened at all, she is looking out at me through the wide door with a smile whose wisdom and warmth are fathomless, so that I can only feel like a child in her presence. And so I am, a child so ignorant that she could hardly begin to explain anything to me. We Americans refuse to be chastened by our own history. I remember a presidential press con ference held shortly after the taking of the hostages in Iran. A reporter was tentatively asking Jimmy Carter whether there might not be some reasons for the seizure, whether the captors might not have some motives. The reporter touched on our long and dedicated commitment to the urbane and brutal Shah and on our providing CIA experts to train the Iranian secret police in methods of torture. These things were available knowledge at the time, though few people outside of Iran were availing themselves of it. Certainly President Carter seemed not to be. He was furious at the question: none of this had any bearing on the matter at hand, he said. The things the reporter